Well, I had been planning a post on the revival of RSS after playing with several interesting iPad apps.

For a while, it looked like Twitter could replace RSS readers for all but the heaviest users. And where RSS readers for iPhone had taken RSS feeds and simplified each story into a plain, easy-to-browse list, developers have reversed that for iPad, pulling each story out to create the beginnings of some really smart dynamic publications.

Some, like Instapaper, are a simple interpretation of a web-based service. Others, Early Edition and Digital Post, play on a classic newspaper look and pick out stories from your RSS feeds to display in a mini-publication.

guardian.co.uk

And then things get interesting. As a design interpretation, converting story feeds into a newspaper format is the first thing you'd think of. Taking things further requires a bit more imagination - and that's what two Stanford University students did with an app called Pulse, which creates a visual browsing guide using images within stories. You can add feeds individually or import from Google Reader. And it could have evolved into something even more interesting.

The app is so good that Steve Jobs referred to it as an example of the work of promising developers during his speech at WWDC. But the euphoria didn't last, because later that night the New York Times requested that Apple remove the app for infringing its rights.

Republished on AllThingsD, NYT lawyer Richard Samson says: "The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use."

The developers, Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, say the app has been downloaded 35,000 times at $4 a time. But that will no doubt be part of the problem for NYT, which, like every other newspaper company, is in dire financial straits. If the app had been free, presumably NYT would have been happy for it to stay.

Kothari and Gupta are planning to remove NYT content from the app and resubmit to Apple. But it's an interesting development in the app space; most iPad apps are considerably more expensive than iPhone apps, and now the space is maturing the action by NYT could be a sign that content firms will be far more protective about their content and associated revenues.

That said, this is an excellent piece of work and one that NYT should be embracing. After all, shouldn't they have come up with something like this themselves?